Comment by MomsAVoxell
6 months ago
I used to use a Java-oriented IDE called “Visix Vibe”, at first as an experiment in application development with Java and then as an alternative to Delphi, which was my bread and butter tooling environment for custom application development.
Both of these IDE’s gave me a huge productivity boost, and it used to be a no-brainer to give customers a realizable estimate for getting the UI done, then wiring up logic, and get things ready to ship, etc.
I really miss these IDE’s, because of the integration factor. It was fun to wire up a database table and generate a form and immediately have something that could be used for data input and validation on the project - then spend a few weeks refining the UI to be more robust and cater to the application use case in focus.
These days, it feels like a lot more careful planning is needed to make sure the UI/API/backend realms can play properly together.
It would be nice to see some more progress on this level of tooling. It’s one thing to have an AI generate UI code - but I still think there is room for painting the code and using a UI to build a UI.
(The moment someone produces a properly WYSIWYG tool for JUCE, the glory days will begin again ..)
> The moment someone produces a properly WYSIWYG tool for JUCE,
Side note: Steinberg's vstgui framework not only has a WYSIWYG editor, you can even build/edit the UI while the plugin is running in a DAW. I usually give Steinberg a lot of shit for their arrogance and ignorance, but this I found extremely cool! I have only toyed around with it, so I don't know how viable it is for complex plugin UIs.
You may laugh, but that is how I use html forms today. Simple. And effective.
I wouldn’t laugh at that, but my context is native applications and will be, for a while. Sure, the web is great and all. But native applications still have a part to play - especially in realms requiring custom applications be built, i.e. not for mass-market.